It would be fair say that we’re fascinated by audiobooks and learning about their production, distribution, and everything else involved in the process. Last month we interviewed Jamie Dupras and Jeff Guillot from Deyan Audio in Los Angeles, but for this month’s podcast episode, we brought the conversation to Canada. Ann Jansen, Director of Audiobook Production at Penguin Random House Canada, and David Caron, Co-Publisher at ECW Press, joined BookNet Canada Research Associate Shimona Hirchberg for a conversation about the state of the audiobook industry in Canada and what’s on the horizon for this rapidly evolving chapter of publishing.

(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)

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Transcript:

Shimona Hirchberg: Hi there, your host of this month's episode of the BookNet Canada Podcast is Shimona Hirchberg. I use she/her pronouns. I'm the Research Associate at BookNet. I'm recording this in midtown Toronto, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and Mississaugas of the New Credit territory. The land I'm quarantining on is part of the parcel of land collectively referred to as the Toronto Purchase, which applies to all land east of Brown's Line to Woodbine Avenue and north towards Newmarket. This treaty allows non-Indigenous Canadians, like myself, to live on this land and use the resources. So, thank you to the stewards of this land. BookNet Canada endorses the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space making in the book industry. We hope that our work helps to create an environment that supports that shift.

For this month's podcast, we'll be talking about audiobooks once again. This time, we're diving deep into the audiobook industry in Canada with David Caron and Ann Jansen. Ann, she/her pronouns, works as Director of Audiobook Production at Penguin Random House Canada. And David, he/him pronouns, works as Co-Publisher at ECW Press.

Tell us where are you calling in from, what you're grateful for in one word, and the longest audiobook you've listened to or worked on. Let's start with Ann.

Ann Jansen: Hi, I am calling in from my apartment in downtown Toronto. If you hear a streetcar, that's because there is one passing by. I am grateful for air conditioning. No, that's two words. Well, then I'll just say the stories that we are living and telling. And the longest audiobook I've ever worked on is First Snow, Last Light by Wayne Johnston. It had four narrators, including Gordon Pinsent, and it was 14 hours plus change.

Shimona: Awesome. David?

David Caron: I am calling in from the ECW office, for which we have a fairly lengthy land acknowledgement on the About Us section of our website. But I'll give you one tidbit, which I find amazing is that, you know, through the stewardship of the Mississaugas of the Credit Nation, they've tried for a long time to work out various issues around Treaty 13, the Toronto Purchase, and they finally concluded that in 2010. It took that long. One word, grateful for change. And longest audiobook is an Austin Clarke memoir called Membering, which is 24 hours long.

Shimona: Okay. Let's start with an overview of the audiobook industry in Canada. Tell us about what's currently happening here in Canada.

Ann: A great deal is happening here in Canada. David, I think you and ECW Press and many indie presses started a few years back as did we at Penguin Random House Canada. And in that time, we've seen the industry establish and grow, and more and more listeners, and leading to an audiobook symposium in January, which was really exciting to have people from across the country in various different parts of making and listening to audiobooks. And yeah, so mostly what we're doing is making as many audiobooks as we can to high standards and keeping listeners engaged with Canadian stories.

David: Yeah, I'll say exactly that, it's an amazing time right now. I think there's more interest in doing audiobooks amongst publishers, amongst narrators than ever before. Right now, we have 50 audiobook titles that are in production, in process. We're doing close to 80 a year now. Publishers are engaged, the, you know, federal government is engaged on issues of accessibility. Because what's happening right now with the film industry and just general interest in doing work like audiobooks, I find that narrators are more available than ever before. People are working on home studios. Studios are open. And really, I mean, in terms of the marketplace, every month, I learn something, you know, amazing and new about what's going on with the listeners of audiobooks in Canada and abroad. So, it's just an incredible time. We've been at this for about five years now. And never has it... You know, it just keeps it building, building in terms of excitement. So, here we are.

Shimona: How do publishers choose which books become audiobooks?

David: So, it's a question of both frontlist and backlist. We have kind of a wealth at our disposal now because of, you know, the number of titles in the backlist that have not been made into audiobooks. And I know publishers are choosing and we're choosing stuff from that backlist. And, of course, frontlist titles are important, too, just in terms of even questions of accessibility of getting out in audio. For us, in terms of our Bespeak list, which is what ECW produces when we license titles from other publishers to produce as audiobooks, you know, we're definitely looking to that backlist and recent frontlist in terms of choosing those particular titles. And there's such a wealth to choose from.

Ann: When we started in 2017, we had an ambitious goal for Penguin Random House Canada, with the variety of imprints that we have and the number of titles, was to as quickly as possible, produce all our upcoming titles, all our frontlist titles. So we started in mid-2017. And when I'm talking about upcoming titles, I'm talking about narrative Fiction and Non-Fiction adult titles. And in 2018, we actually achieved that goal and we were able to do a full roster. We also did some catalogue or backlist titles based on anniversaries or an exciting new title coming out from an author who had some great books in the catalogue. So we reached those goals. And then we started adding into the mix books for middle-grade readers and YA books. But just generally, in terms of strategy, we definitely want to continue doing all the frontlist narrative titles, so not so much cookbooks, but all the ones with story and that kind of voice. We also have been able to go back and do books like Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai or Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, books by Richard Wagamese. And then we have a couple of exciting anniversaries coming up where we're actually doing audiobooks of slightly older books, like Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels and Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci. And I remember reading those when they first came out 20 years ago, I think or whatever the anniversary is. So we're kind of doing a mix of those things and staying on track with continuing to produce all our titles.

Shimona: What role do licensing and rights play and how do they relate to distribution, especially subscription services?

Ann: David, why don't you field that because I'm a little more involved in production, and I'll add on.

David: Sure. Yeah. And just to clarify, you mean, like, in terms of licensing titles for audiobooks as opposed to licensing other copyrighted material to go into our audiobooks, right? You mean the forms, right?

Shimona: Yeah. Yes.

David: Yeah, so I mean, that's actually our solution or our strategy to do what Ann was talking about, which PRHC is, which is to have all of our titles that are suitable for audiobooks get produced as audio is we engage a mixture of both licensing titles to other publishers to produce as well as producing our own. Also, we've licensed titles from other publishers to produce. And I think, you know, by doing that, hopefully, we're gonna diversify the audiobook publishing industry and hopefully get into what I would consider the specialization, that is, we might be the right publisher for a certain title and somebody else might be the right publisher as an audiobook publisher for another title, even though we were the print publisher for that. You know, and oftentimes how we make the choices is, one, I mean, I think we're getting known for the kind of literary audiobooks that we're doing. But two, if we have an idea about the kind of voice we wanna hear, the kind of narrator we wanna have, that is typically one where we will produce that audiobook as opposed to see if there's another audiobook publisher who will license that, too, because we will lose that control, obviously, if we do that. We won't be able to decide on the narrator in that particular instance.

You know, and I think a lot of publishers are looking to adopt a similar kind of strategy, taking a look at the kind of books that they have and which ones for them or they feel strongest about what the narrator needs to be, in terms of the audiobook. How does distribution relate? You think about that in terms of what markets that audiobook publisher has, and therefore, you know, what you would do with that. You know, an obvious example is if you were, you know, licensing an audiobook to Audible, let's say. But it's a book that you knew from your own experience that it was a very strong, you know, library or strong in terms of sales to libraries for that book. It wouldn't be the, I think, the one that you would choose. You maybe would choose, you know, record it or another audiobook publisher for that one, and then maybe focus your energies on them licensing another audiobook. And that's where I think the distribution aspect comes into play.

Shimona: And do you do that when you're buying a book or this comes along later on?

David: Oh, yeah, very much so. That's why, for us, in terms of licensing, you know, the audiobooks that we license, we've been focusing a lot on more literary audiobooks because I think we're fairly strong in terms of working with the library services like Overdrive and Hoopla about our books. And, you know, I think that we do a good job with those books, especially. And again, I'm hoping that, you know, that we'll become known for that over time and be seen for that. Although we do license a fair number of Non-Fiction as well, and that ends up being something that does fairly well for us, in terms of sales. So...

Ann: It's very exciting to see how much your program, David, and related programs have grown over the years. And for us, I can't remember the last time we've licensed something. We tend to acquire audiobook rights on the head contract for all of our acquisitions. We aim for that. And then, again, we go back and get rights for significant backlist titles to build up the list. But we also get rights for titles that we publish in tandem with other international publishers, in particular, whether we're buying masters from another publisher that has produced the audio in their territory or selling ones that we have produced that then go elsewhere in the world if we don't have world rights, for example. And that's a significant part of our program. And also we work on shared titles with our colleagues in the UK and the US for Penguin Random House titles. So, we have, you know, those hundreds of books that kind of flow through over the course of a year. We have licensed select audiobook titles. One, in particular, which I think is pretty important at this time is by Ritu Bhasin, The Authenticity Principle. And she's doing, you know, very valuable work in diversity and inclusion. And we're about to co-publish, well, do the audiobook with Dundurn Press for Seven by Farzana Doctor. And that's a very, very powerful story. So we're sort of exploring that, but we've had a lot to concentrate on with all of our titles. And, you know, amongst all the imprints, it goes back a lot of years for a lot of different authors. And for distribution. I think any of the titles that we produce are going to be in libraries as well as with all the audiobook vendors. And I think that, you know, authors find it a very compelling argument in terms of rights that, you know, if they sign with us, it's more and more essential as we move further and further into producing audiobooks that they will be available, their books will be available as audio through libraries and on every retailer where we have the rights in a territory.

Shimona: Speaking of libraries and retail, and how that opens up books to more people, let's talk a little bit about accessible audiobooks. What are the standards or best practices that you implement? And also, in general, like, how is accessibility currently or starting to be more incorporated into your workflow?

David: So, we do, whether it's... Well, especially when we get an audiobook or a title from another publisher that they must produce for them, we do an accessibility assessment on that from the get-go. And that is looking at identifying non-accessible content, whether it's, you know, alt text for images and graphs and whatnot, and those bibliographies, that kind of thing. And then Leah, our Audiobook Manager, she advises the publishers about what the best idea might be to deal with that content. And they either implement those things in-house or they hire someone to do that work so that we get to the point where we actually have a final reading script for the narrator that includes all those pieces. And there are times, you know, when we've hired two narrators. One, to do the bibliography, for example, and one to do the rest of the book, just because the bibliography is so extensive. So, you know, sometimes that gets involved or relates into the casting. I know, as a publisher, I know a lot of publishers across Canada are doing this now, we are looking to incorporate that earlier into the process and into the editorial process now, and just in terms of, you know, knowing that the image is in there, what is the alt text for that going to be, for example? And just looking to, you know, make those accessibility considerations part of the entire process right from the get-go. So, you know, I think we might have to do less of that accessibility assessment down the road, when that's in place. But, you know, these are changes that happen over time.

Ann: And I'd agree, I think that we are really just exploring this more robustly now. And we're starting to produce our first fully accessible audiobooks, trying to keep in mind, as David says, you know, what are we giving that reflects entirely what the book is, whether it's additional content, like endnotes or footnotes, whether it's describing something that is there as a visual. As I'm reading books now, I'm looking at it and going, "Okay, so there's a photo there, but, oh, thank goodness, the author actually described what her mother looked like in that photo back in, you know, whatever year it was in her mother's life," things like that. In the past, we've put out PDFs, you know, for content such as graphs or things that weren't very audio-friendly. So we're definitely exploring new terrain with this and just trying to find the right way. And I would say that I'm really grateful for David, we've already been talking about this and we're learning as we go. And as far as I understand, you know, there are people working hard on international standards for this. And we want to make sure that we meet that. And in the long run that there's kind of a better technological solution for people who want all the aspects of an audiobook because they don't have access to it any other way. But yeah, this is the way of the future. Absolutely.

Shimona: That's a great segue for me to talk more about the people, from not only their readers, but also from the authors, everyone in the studio or freelancing, depending on whether or not there's outsourcing going on. I'm curious to know about whether you each have a commitment to hire Black, Indigenous, or people of colour, whether that's as an intern, employee, or a studio owner?

Ann: Yes. David? Yes. We both do, I think, as should everyone right now. I guess I would say...

David: Yeah, that's a yes.

Ann: Yeah. Yeah, that's a definite yes. Now, if you want more about how we're doing it, happy to go into that. I guess I would start with saying that audiobooks do involve a lot of people and they involve a lot of real time. So, a real person needs to, you know, read all those words. Real people need to help cast and find the right voice. Real people need to edit and pull it all together. It's just a lot of people involved at every stage, which is, I think, sometimes people involved in audiobooks are much more vividly aware of how much real time it takes and how many people are involved. It's a very collaborative medium, I think I would say. Not that publishing isn't but this one, you actually have to show up and sit in the studio and somebody is listening, and paying attention. In that way, it's just a different kind of way of working. I would say, for us, it starts with the team. And in-house, I know that Penguin Random House has, within the past year, changed its internship program so that the internships are longer and are paid with the intention of, you know, spreading the net and engaging people from a greater variety of places. And on our audiobook team right now, which is a total of seven people, three of them are former interns. And so that's kind of a great ratio that if we open up the internship, that will help us in the future. The last time we hired a full-time person, we tried really hard to get outside our usual places where we post and to tap into a variety of different networks. I did a lot more pre-interview calls and outreach than I have ever done, I think, well, than I've done at Penguin Random House before.

And thinking about that in terms of our freelancers, whether it's our directors or our engineers who are editing, I know Penguin Random House is looking at things on all different levels, including people we are partnering with in terms of everything from, you know, recording books and studios to how we interact with freelancers. I'm trying to think about other ways that people are involved. Of course, we involve authors a lot with our audiobooks, in terms of casting, but also making sure we get all the elements right. And we've always, I think, from day one paid a lot of attention to matching the voice with the book. And that means everything from gender, cultural connections, age, all those kinds of things. So, the commitment to hiring narrators, if it's not the actor reading a book that comes from a different cultural perspective, the commitment is absolutely to find the right voice and be really aware of what's needed, but also without, you know, limiting actors and narrators to those titles either, just to make sure that the door is as open as possible and that people can be there with us, with all the people who make these audiobooks. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. But David, I think you've got the same story where there's a lot of different people playing, you know, to make it all happen.

David: Yeah, very much so. You said it very well, Ann. I mean, we've only have two people in-house who are focused primarily on audiobooks. And we do the same things in terms of internships, being paid, and looking for Black, Indigenous, or people of colour for those internships, to give that kind of training. But yeah, a lot of the work that gets done on the audiobooks are done by the narrators, by directors, by editors, by auditors, and in each one of those instances, you know, that is, you know, we're looking for diversity within that. And that's what is amazing to me, is that the talent in this country, if we wanna just talk about narrators and directors, the talent in this country is immense. And it is incredibly diverse. If you are looking for, you know, something in particular, there is going to be a lot of talented actors who can step up to the plate and be there for you. And I think the thing about audiobook work is that we need to really get to know who's out there and we need to give them work. Because it's that experience in doing audiobooks that is going to make our audiobook industry even better. It's gonna lead to that actor, that director getting more work. And the other thing is, it's also, I think, about the books that are getting produced here, about the kind of work that, you know, for us, that we are licensing from other publishers to do. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to showcase the best of Canadian literature in all its diversity.

And it's incredible to me because part of our Bespeak program, we asked over 200 people, we said, "What would be the top five books, you know, Canadian-authored books that haven't been done as audiobooks that you would like to see done?" And the diversity of what came out of that, I think, spoke volumes about what it is that we as a country have to offer. So, you know, if you look at our Bespeak list, you will see, you know, our number one title right now is Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard's book, which Marcia Johnson narrated. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom, In Search of April Raintree, you know, Jonny Appleseed, Islands of Decolonial Love. These are the kind of audiobooks, I'm just looking at sort of our top books there, that people are responding to in that Bespeak list. And I think that speaks a lot, I get also the Canadian marketplace and what audiobook listeners want to listen to. So, it's very much embedded as much as we can make it into what we think about how we plan and what we implement.

Ann: May I just add one thing to that? I was just gonna say that I think we're all looking at kind of an accounting right now and an understanding of where we are, where we need to do a lot better in publishing, in individual companies, in departments, all that kind of stuff, and placing kind of where we are and what bases we need to probably give up in some ways in terms of... And I'm speaking as a white woman of a certain age. And in my team, out of the seven of us, I think two people would identify as people of colour. But there's so much more work that needs to be done and we're working in an industry that has, you know, really high needs for education, generally, and formal education in a lot of cases, not always, and also isn't always as remunerative as some other industries and some other kinds of work. So, you know, really high skills and wishing we could pay much more to get everybody to a great place in expensive cities and all that kind of thing. So, I don't know, I just wanted to throw that out as in, you know, I think it's really an industry-wide accounting in a way and accountability, for sure. I don't know if this adds much to what David was saying. But I think every opportunity we have, like, let's seize that opportunity. And in terms of narrators and directors, an enormous wealth, and then we really just started this industry within the last five years in Canada, I think, really, if you put everybody together. And so most people who walked into our studios, either the studios that we work with outside of our own building and the one that we built after a little while, most of them had never read an audiobook before. Very few people had done this. And so, now we're seeing people come back and you mentioned Marcia, David. She's also directing for us. She's read a book for us. If we all work together to make sure that we, you know, give as many opportunities as possible, knowing that there aren't quite as many Canadians as there are some, you know, populations in different parts of the world.

David: Yeah, I think you hit on the fact that, you know, the relative youth of this industry provides opportunities that, I know when I look around book publishing, that's where the real change needs to happen. And that's where we're putting in a lot of, you know, reflection and interrogation in terms of what needs to change and trying to make that change happen. I find that book publishing has to catch up a little bit to what audiobooks are doing.

Ann: Interesting.

Shimona: We're talking a lot about opportunities in this industry and also how much Canada has to offer, especially geographically, and I think maybe also especially in our new COVID reality of remote working where things have really opened up so much more. And you're talking about how, Ann, how...if we're in a moment of accountability. Does that play into your vision of what the future of audiobook production looks like in Canada?

Ann: Oh, I think absolutely. And I think as David said, because we're a bit newer on the scene, we have not maybe, you know, kind of, hopefully, more open spaces to explore. I think we're really lucky to be in audio in the sense that even though COVID-19 has hit people very, very hard, with audio, we were able to adjust and start working remotely. We found, as David, I think, referenced earlier, that people had either home studios or a closet that was nicely decorated with quilts that worked until it became too hot. But, you know, there are a lot of narrators who are adjusting and making sure that they were set up. There's some who are already set up. We did move back into studios, but we still have directors working remotely. So we keep contact to a minimum. And it's all about audio. I was directing Margaret Atwood reading her new book of poetry, Dearly. And I was at my dining room table. And she was in studio carefully masked with an engineer and then going into this separate space with a barrier, and reading these wonderful, wonderful poems. So, audio gets back to the heart of it, which is a voice telling a story. We're talking right now. We're all... I can't see you, I can't see David, I can't see our listeners, but I can imagine them and I connect through the voice, and the voice carries so much, and gives you so much. So, with audio, we have been really fortunate to be able to, I think, ride the...whatever, I don't think "waves" is quite the right word.

But whatever this, all this change. And David, you're much more succinct than me in terms of one word, change, that's pretty great. And most stories involve some kind of change. I guess we can connect there. But I would say that right now, we have one person working in Vancouver, who just, it was better for her to be there with her family situation. We have somebody working in Victoria on our own team. We are, I hope, going to, over time, be able to move beyond Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal as production sites. I mean, we always do get authors into studios when they're in different places and there are studios across the land. But certainly, with post-production, you know, there are lots of opportunities. And any of them that we could take that, you know, involve geography, but also new ways of working that we're discovering. And the fact that audio, you know, you just press a few keys and the audio moves somewhere. I don't want it to move too far beyond Canada, but it can move anywhere in Canada if you ask me. Does that make sense, David?

David: Oh, yeah, exactly. I mean, you said it very well. I mean, you know, we're working with, I think this year, I counted 14 different studios across Canada. And then, just in terms of the studios, we really can be, you know, all across Canada. But what you're talking about is, I liken it to catching up in some ways to the way things work in the US, where there's this wealth of narrators who have set up home studios in the US, and we don't have that as much in Canada. People have done it. There certainly is a lot in Canada already. But that was primarily being done, you know, for American production. But now we've got the situation where we've got this burgeoning amount of production happening in Canada. And a lot of people, for us anyway, we're going into studio to record, but then COVID hit. And on one level, you know, it still is, as Ann was saying, a place where people are in a room all by themselves, so you can go in safely and record. But a lot of people were now setting up their own studios because of this. And there's a technological obstacle that we have to overcome. And we're in the midst of doing that as people get set up or people have been set up. But once done, now we then will have that infrastructure of home narrators that we could draw upon. It will just be a great thing.

Ann: Future is shiny, we hope, even though there's some setbacks along the way.

David: Yeah, this is a positive from it, I think.

Shimona: I think that bit about setting up the infrastructure is so great, especially considering how useful the audiobook industry in Canada is. Like, it's only, you were saying, about five years. So, just think about how we're setting up a foundation for years to come.

Ann: Exciting.

David: Yeah, it's very exciting. And that's the thing, I think, you know, as more and more people get involved in it, we'll become more and more mature, I would say, as an industry. And that's where, for me, that's the long-term goal.

Shimona: Thank you both so much for your insights, for your time, and your voice.

David: Thank you. It's great to talk to you.

Ann: Yeah, thank you.

Shimona: We'd like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support to the Canada Book Fund. Thank you, listeners. We hope you enjoy this episode and that you join us again in the future. Bye.

Podcast: The story of Canadian audiobooks

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